Tag: andrew chen

• Evolution of online marketplaces

  I have written a lot about Opendoor over the past few years because it is one of the most promising “proptech” startups in operation today and I am obviously very interested in the impact of tech on the real estate industry. 

  I also have a fascination with online marketplaces. From the Greek agora to today’s mobile apps, the exchange of goods and services is a fundamental human activity. Uber, Alibaba, Instacart, Airbnb, Amazon, and Kickstarter are all marketplaces. I think sometimes people forget that.

  Andrew Chen, who is a general partner with the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, recently published an essay on the future of online marketplaces, where he argued that what’s next is a reinvention of the $10 trillion service economy.

  Andrew posits that the internet has brought about 4 eras of marketplaces. They are:

  1. The Listings Era (1990s)
  2. The Unbundled Craigslist Era (2000s)
  3. The “Uber for X” Era (2009-)
  4. The Managed Marketplace Era (Mid-2010s)

  The listing era birthed marketplaces that were essentially online versions of the things that already existed offline. Craigslist, for example, simply took the classified section and put it on the internet.

  Over time, these online marketplaces began to focus on specific verticals (the unbundling of Craiglist) and they started to introduce services and features that were native to the internet and later to mobile. Uber obviously only works when everyone has a smartphone.

  Today we are living in the era of what Andrew calls the managed marketplace. Opendoor – to get back to the first paragraph of this post – is a managed marketplace. Instead of just connecting homeowners with buyers, they take on specific steps of the value chain. They buy and fix up the homes themselves.

  So what’s next? 

  Supposedly it is regulated services (2018-?). As of 2015, it was estimated that about 26% of employed people in the US carried some sort of license. These are healthcare practitioners, architects, engineers, real estate agents, financial advisors, trades people, and so on.

  And the argument is that a lot of how we regulate services today is a result of us creating them before the internet. We needed licenses and certifications to signal to us who was qualified and who was not. But now we have technology to help us do that, which is why this could be the next great era of online marketplaces.

  2018.11.27

• Vuja de

  

  Most of us know what déjà vu means. Quite literally, it means: already seen. What you may be less familiar with is the idea of “vuja de.” 

  The term was coined by the late comedian George Carlin (above), but it has been appropriated by design and innovation firms such as IDEO, as well as many others. 

  Here is one way to describe the difference (taken from a blog post by Andrew Chen):

  Deja vu is when you see something new, but feel like you’ve already seen it before.

  Vuja de is when you’ve seen something a million times, but see it like it’s the first time.

  Why vuja de is valuable is because it can help you and I spot opportunities. If the best ideas are indeed the ones that are non-consensus (they sound stupid at first), then it pays to see things differently, with fresh eyes.

  I also think it’s a valuable concept because – as Andrew explains in his post – we have a natural tendency over time toward becoming more, as opposed to less, closed off to new ideas.

  As we gain more life and work experiences, we start to become entrenched in how we view the world. We believe that we know what will work and what will not work. Nobody will rent their home to strangers. Nobody will get out of their car and ride a bike to work. And so on.

  But the problem with that thinking is that it leads to consensus, rather than non-consensus, outcomes. And as we’ve discussed before, those aren’t as valuable (or cool, depending on what we’re talking about).

  So vuja de is not just a great platform for telling jokes. It is something worth working on in business and in life.

  Image: HBO

  2017.01.05